Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. […]

He’s really on to something here, because even unconverted, raw Markdown is really, really readable, due mainly to his removing URLs from the flow of the page. This seems like a small thing, but, in practice, it makes things SO much easier.

Here, read this. This is some markdown text for one of the pages on his site. You can read it really well, can’t you? And this is raw — the post-Markdown version is here.

I really like the practice of the “reference” style URLs. For instance, this markdown…

[Gadgetopia][gdtc] is a good site.

…will link the words “Gadgetopia” to a URL specified anywhere else on the page, like this:

[gdtc]: http://www.gadgetopia.com/

So you could set all your links up like footnotes at the end of the text, instead of jumbled up in the word flow. Very nicely done. I could actually see unleashing Markdown on users, whereas Textile was a geek-only affair.

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Much discussion went on about this on the Markdown mailing-list earlier this summer, and it was decided (by John) that requiring the pair of empty bracket, was a tiny sacrifice in readability really worth accepting, because it removed a lot of ambiguity from the syntax.